Guitar School Chapter 2

      Greetings all! Its been a busy summer here in Red Wing, with a lot of working, saving, and even a wedding!

Happy to be starting my third and final year at Minnesota State College, Southeast Technical in the Guitar Design and Development program. This year will be another jam packed with all sorts of new knowledge for me to apply to my guitar repair and building skills. Classes this year will include computer aided graphic design using Rhino CAD, CNC carving using designs imported from the Rhino program, Arch top instrument construction of an F-5 Mandolin, and as many other builds as I can fit into the busy schedule. I am hoping to complete two more electric guitars ( a Telecaster, and an SG ) and possibly a commissioned acoustic guitar.

      Classes started last week and already we are humming along! We are already making simple drawings in the Rhino CAD program! This will be an invaluable skill in the research, development, and design of my future guitar endeavors, as well as a useful skill in many other job fields. Many of the top manufacturers are already using CAD design and CNC machines to carve precise copies of their guitar models. This provides precision, and quality control that is hard to match.

      Our first assignments in repairs class are common repair shop type jobs such as filling and re routing acoustic guitar saddle slots for proper intonation. Making new nuts, saddles, and bridge copies. Performing a full re fret, and a neck reset on a traditional dovetail construction acoustic guitar. All of these jobs are common place in most repair facilities and will be graded on quality, adherence to specifications, and time taken. I have already begun to fill and re rout a saddle slot, and make a new nut for one of the school owned instruments.

      I have chosen to build an F-5 Mandolin for my arch top construction project this year! The F style mandolin will be a challenging, and rewarding build with all of its intricate scroll work and fine detail. The back, sides and neck will be carved from beautiful figured red maple, and the top will be high grade Adirondack spruce. The instrument will have an ebony fingerboard, head caps ( front and back ) Chrome hardware, Tortoise bindings, and a vintage amber nitrocellulose lacquer finish.

         
            The first step in the build was to join the spruce top wedges. Each piece was run through the joiner to flatten the inside face and square the center edge to the flat bottom. The joiner got the pieces almost perfectly square and a shooting board with a joiner plane was used to finish them for a perfectly smooth square center seam.
            The pieces were then glued and clamped in bar clamps for 2 hours checking for a good seam once clamped tightly.

           
            Once the glue has set and dried the top plate is removed from the clamps and inspected again for a good seam. The joint is almost invisible to the eye, and the plate is ready to be re flattened on the inside surface and prepped for carving.

Book-matching the tightly grained spruce aligns the grain to run out in opposite directions in the two halves. This produces the color difference when viewed from different angles, and also gives strength to the joint and a bit of rigidity to the plate over its surface. 

            While the glue joint was drying we were each given an inside mold structure for the mandolin, which i had made over the summer while working as a work study for the guitar instructors. The mold provides a pattern and form for the rib structure of the instrument and a guideline for the top and back plate. 

            Using a master template I traced and cut a top/back template out of Formica counter top laminate material that will serve as the shape template for the instrument. After tracing the original and cutting the copy closely o the band saw the template is brought to final dimension by hand using files and scrapers. 

And that brings us to Labor Day weekend! Hope you all enjoyed the post and will check in every Sunday for all the latest developments ! Enjoy your Monday off and see ya next week!